Super-Sized Series

 Marriage

 

 

Lemon Bread by Judith Waller Carroll

 

We are straddling the gap
between winter and spring.
Wind through bare branches,
a sky more gray than blue.

Perhaps deliciously happy
is not in my makeup,
the way I opt for savory over sweet,
shun sugar for spice.  

Still, there are moments, like now,
watching you in the kitchen
as you squeeze the plump lemons
over the hot, fragrant loaf.

The sun has come out
on the blossoming dogwoods,
the first new leaves
on the hydrangea’s stiff stalks.

What You Saw and Still Remember  

 

 

Meals While Married by Tina Hacker

He exiles fiery spices for me,
curry, chili powder, chives.
I sample endless potatoes for him,
Peruvian purple, Yukon gold, Bintje yellow.
I veto three-bean salad and olives
while he piles them on his plate.
He shudders at the sight of gefilte fish
on my fork in all its gelatinous glory.
We laugh and hardly notice
the peppers and tomatoes sliding
from my salad onto his,
the cucumbers and carrots
tossed onto mine. Automatic
as coffee in the morning.
 
First appeared in Little Balkans Review   

 

 

Marriage Soup by Margaret Coombs
 
Though she never asks him to, on winter Saturdays
he packs their child into the econo-car, skids
 
to the library at closing time. The wind bites
her face with needle snow. Between gusts,
 
she sees the four-year-old’s face pressed against
the cold window as he watches for her red coat.
 
At home, they peel off jackets, hats, boots, enter
a kitchen steaming with scents of onion, carrots,
 
split peas, and bacon for crumbling on top.
While the world darkens, the three feast like gods.
 
Thirty years later, she reads him this poem.
“Let’s eat,” he answers.
 

 

Remembering Rainstorms by Mary Ellen Talley

I would camp with you right now
and listen to the sound of rain
pelting our tent
just like we did
in the Canadian Rockies
where scenery trapped us
in gob-smacked awe.   

The air flows cold.
Rain will keep coming tonight,
torrents growing and ebbing.
(I recall joys of a dry tent on the banks
of the Metolius, when other campers
fled for motels and we held each other
with thoughts of future children.)

Before long, summers in August
with our son and daughter,
thunder storm nights
ending a glorious week at Orcas Island.
We’d pack up in the morning—
hot oatmeal and soggy families
caravanning out to the ferry line.

The sultry air this afternoon
predicted rain.     
Dark clouds and evening trickle
have become this deluge
at 2:00 a.m.     Noisy water
reaches inside my open window
as I lean into fresh scent of memory.

I am back inside our tent
on another rainy night
outside of Jasper,
snug in zipped-together sleeping bags.

I want to run outside
and announce it’s all okay
as long as the ground cloth
under our dome
is folded short of the tent floor.
We rejoice—avoiding
the chill of a damp down bag.    

Tomorrow morning, we’ll be home, won’t
stand under a tarp tethered to neighboring trees
as we used to do while overdosing on hot cocoa
with mini-marshmallows.

I move upstairs to lie beside you
in our dry house,    
the cleansed air
smelling of green spruce.
 

 

10TH ANNIVERSARY by Barbara Crooker
 
Ten years ago, after the first night
we spent together,
we went to pick strawberries
knee-deep in furrows of scalloped leaves,
white flowers winking like stars.
It's still early morning,
but we're drunk on the winy air
and the headiness of our desire.
As we kissed more than we picked,
our mouths brushed like petals
rubbing in the wind,
our crimson fingers strayed
beyond the boundaries of clothing.
Stitch us in that tapestry forever,
baskets full of berries, and always in love . . . .
But we had to go home,
 

turn the fresh fruit into preserves:
hull and cull the berries, crush them
with lemon, boil until thick
and sweet with yearning and sun.
Sealed in wax, each jar's stained glass,
full of the light.
And when we spread this redness
on morning toast, sparks
rekindle and glow.
 
And now it's ten years later.
Strawberry picking's an annual
task I do alone, or with a friend.
I boil the jam down to the clatter
of children underfoot.
And our eyes meet over curly heads
and our hands brush like green leaves in the wind . . . .
And the jam shines in its cathedral of wax,
the sweetness of early June
poured in glass jars.
On January mornings,
when love & light are memories,
these red suns
light our cellar shelf.                                

From Barbara Crooker: Selected Poems (FutureCycle Press 2015)   

 

 

As soon as he left, I cut the onion by Rose Mary Boehm

Of course I didn’t cry.
The doorframe shook and a couple of windows protested.

His hands in his coat pockets, his collar up, even though it is a fresh,
gentle spring morning in the London suburbs.

He’d been to the market. Dumped everything on the counter.
What killed me was that chicken with all the feathers attached.

Got it from a farmer? I am not my grandmother.
Just because I’d asked him to do the shopping. What a jerk.

I suppose I was a little shrill. Like the day I found a spider
in my bed. All I needed was a frog to kiss.

Previously published in Offcourse     

 

 

 

 

Carolynn Kingyens with strawberry-rhubarb pie

From Scratch by Carolynn Kingyens

I didn’t know how to bake
from scratch
using egg, oil, flour,
or a hint of vanilla.

I didn’t know
how to construct a crust
to hold the sweet inside —
spiced apples, ripen peaches;
to hold the savory inside —
minced meat, scrambled eggs,
sharp cheddar.

"Recipes are endless
when baking with pie shells,"
his mother said,
encouraging me to try
as she went to work
in my designer kitchen
rolling endless strips
of pastry dough
on cold, pretty whitish-gray marble.

She’d knead nooks
in dough
malleable as an infant,
molded niches with her long,
nimble farm fingers —
an edible, delectable womb,
a crust to hold the love inside
for her only child, a son,
my husband
who’d request his favorite pie —
strawberry rhubarb,
a recipe passed down
from her mother’s mother
to be lost
on her son's wife.

Poet’s note: The photo was taken in December 1999, when I was twenty-five. My husband and I had only been married a month when this photo was taken. His parents were visiting from Canada, and my new mother-in-law was showing me how to make a pie from scratch. This November, my husband and I will be married twenty-five years. Time went by so quickly.

Cedar by Shoshauna Shy

You don’t marry the man;
you marry the family

sounded as clammy as the weight of wet
bedsheets, cumbersome, confining,
chilling as sleet. Yet before the wedding,

I came to learn that holidays happened
with all generations, homemade rhubarb
cobbler and lemonade; any whiff of a sister’s
budding romance earned teasing and sly
interrogations; that publications, promotions
and other achievements met a groundswell
of applause.
 
There were the old stories from childhood–
the peaches in crates under bunkbeds
at the cottage; sisters in fisticuffs over
“borrowed” dresses; that their mother
strained Coke through a handkerchief
when the glass thermos broke at the movies.
Stories recapped so many times till it seemed

I had been there and lived them myself,
like I, too, had grown up in their Wisconsin
farm town, not my suburb on Lake Michigan.
Or that I swung on two playgrounds that day
Kennedy got shot and died on camera; Trick
or Treated both Union and Wesley streets;
played Spud under double the streetlights.
And in decade #4 knotted tight as his wife

I’m well-versed in the dip of the gossip
bucket, feel pride in the skills of athletic
grand-nieces, confide freely in brothers-in-law.
For what once sounded like a Doomsday
warning turned out not to be treacherous

at all, those bedsheets woven with merino
and silk, sun-washed on clotheslines,
scented with cedar.
                        
Originally published in an anthology on marriage by Pure Slush Books  

 

 

Navigation by Joanne Durham

For forty years I’ve traced the freckles
on your back, imagined constellations,
like the ones you conjure when stars
dazzle ocean darkness – Look, you say,

farmer with spilled milk pail, goat grazing
for pickles. I never connect the dots
shoulders to hips, no A to Z, our map swirling
from San Antonio to Sesimbra, from bull snakes

of Lake Jackson to the wind-rocked single bed
of the Gualala Hotel. Not our wedding aisle’s
ribboned path but scattered shells after high tide.
The luxury of lying here, following crumbs

of the crusty bread you bake, always more
than enough to find my way home.

First published in Halfway Down the Stairs  

 

 

Honeymoon in Cartagena by Alan Walowitz

I said to my wife at the time,
though don’t remember
if it was a question or answer.
We had gotten to know each other enough
but not enough to care
where we were going or with whom.
All we knew, we’d never be this young again-
and get so close to the equator
to offer liberty such latitude.
We’d pack light--underwear and fins--
fly a no-name, then
take it off our taxes as Married Joint--
just the way our mothers had dreamed.
Search for the kids we’d teach
before they arrive in Queens,
the ones who always insist,
I’m going back to my country,
which sort of means, Señora,
I don’t ever intend to do the homework.
We’d claim what brought us was Best Practices,  
Human Relations, Mutual Understanding.
I’ll take a picture standing in front
of the ramshackle school with the hoop
hanging crooked from the backboard,
the kids looking out the window as if,
these were people of consequence,
in madras shorts, and too tightly strung sarong
no matter how hot it got in April--
which we might have expected
except one of us or the other
never made it our business
to look at the guidebooks.
That’s how attached we were
one to the other, some used to say.
Others used to say,
already good at distancing,
for lovers who claim to be joined at the hip.

 

 

A Contemporary Table by Jacqueline Jules

Our first purchase as a married couple
was a dining set of contemporary design.
A choice we both agreed
reflected our tastes, our style. We were not
Country French, Colonial, or Queen Anne.
We were Contemporary, in full accord,
unlike your father and mother or mine,
who argued over petty issues in their lives.

We agreed, raising long-stemmed
crystal glasses in toast at a table set
with our wedding gift best.

We agreed, a piano would be
our next sweet splurge.

“Really?” Your eyebrows rose.
“What about a grill?”

I don't remember every harsh word said
or exactly how long we cried.
Years have passed since that first fight
I could almost forget —
if not for our dining table
which bears the scars today
of two long-stemmed crystal glasses
smashed against its legs. 

 

 

Shirts by Sharon Waller Knutson

While he plays
racquetball
in his sweats,
she tosses
his dozen shirts
in the laundromat dryer
and then rushes off
to Smitty’s Café
to meet her sister
for lunch and then
home to clean house
and cook dinner.

She doesn’t remember
the shirts until she slides
the casserole and cake
in the oven. She searches
the laundromat
but the shirts have vanished.
Socks, sheets and blankets
spin in the dryer where
the sheets once swirled.

Married just six months,
she imagines him handing
her divorce papers
as she finds the stores
where he buys his shirts
closed and her bank
account on empty.

Smoke billows and flames
crackle as they drive up,
she in her yellow bug
and he in his VW wagon
just as the fire truck arrives.
Her tears flow so fast
they flood the flowers
in the pots and the garden
as she gulps, Shirts gone.

He holds her close and says,
We can always buy more